Lewis Carroll
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was born on January 27, 1832, in Daresbury, Cheshire, England, the third of eleven children in a Church of England clergyman’s family. He displayed extraordinary aptitude for mathematics and won a studentship to Christ Church, Oxford, where he became a lecturer in mathematics for twenty-six years. As a logician and mathematician he published serious academic works, but he is immortal under his pen name Lewis Carroll, adopted for his literary work.
The story of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland begins on July 4, 1862, when Dodgson told an improvised story about a girl who falls down a rabbit hole while rowing with the three daughters of the Dean of Christ Church, including ten-year-old Alice Liddell. Alice begged him to write it down, and the manuscript he produced, illustrated by John Tenniel, was published in 1865. The sequel, Through the Looking-Glass, appeared in 1871.
The Alice books are without precedent in children’s literature and remain without equal. Their combination of mathematical and logical playfulness, subversive humour, dreamlike narrative structure, and sharply observed social satire operates simultaneously as pure childhood pleasure and sophisticated adult wit. The books are among the most quoted, translated, and adapted works in the English language, and have exerted a profound influence on literary nonsense, surrealism, and postmodern fiction. Carroll’s verbal inventions, from chortle and galumph to the portmanteau formations of the Jabberwocky poem, have permanently enriched the language.
Dodgson was also a pioneering portrait photographer of the Victorian era. He died on January 14, 1898, in Guildford, Surrey. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has never been out of print. It has been translated into over 170 languages, adapted into countless stage productions, operas, and films, and continues to generate new critical and creative responses. It is one of the foundational texts of world literature and one of the most influential children’s books ever written.
